Can HN really deliver enough traffic to a static site to cost a significant amount? I've had mildly popular posts on HN for my Netlify blog (John Carmack tweeted about it!) and not had to pay for bandwidth.
The concern for me is a lack of hard limit on spending on GCP, Azure, and AWS. If I screw up and allocate a bunch of resources unintentionally, I'm left holding the bill. That's a terrible setup for PaaS because all programming involves mistakes eventually, especially for new users learning the system.
Granted, there are likely limits on accounts, but those are to protect the services from fraud, no to protect the user from overspending. The limits aren't well defined and it's not something you can rely on because MS might consider $10k / month a small account while it's a ton of money for me.
Azure customers have been asking for hard limits on spending for 8 [1] years with radio silence for the last 5.
There's a difference in goals I guess. If I spend more than expected I WANT things to break. Microsoft, Google, and Azure want me to spend unlimited amounts of money, even if I don't have it. At least AWS can be set up using a prepaid credit card so if I screw up they have to call me to collect their money and I negotiate.
1. https://feedback.azure.com/forums/170030-signup-and-billing/...
- Hobby kid doesn't want to overpay, shut everything down
- Business absolutely doesn't care about spend, if they get some kind of marketing result traffic spike they just want the site to stay up even if it blows the average budget
Guess which one they optimise for?
Almost everyone will be unhappy if they're stuck with a six figure bill for non-converting visits because their site went viral. Everyone will be unhappy if they're stuck with a six figure bill because their site was used in a DDoS reflection attack, or got pwned and used in a DDoS attack directly.
Everything I run on nickle-and-dime-to-death cloud services, such as AWS, won't even respond to unauthenticated requests (Nginx return 444, or reachable only via Wireguard) precisely to mitigate this risk. To do anything else is just financially irresponsible.
I've even considered coding a kill switch that will shut down AWS instances if they exceed billing limits, but the fact that AWS charges a fee to check your spend via an API makes this awkward and speaks volumes about Amazon's motivations.
Amazon's refusal to offer spending caps on AWS benefits Amazon and only Amazon.
While this statement can be true in some cases I vividly remember bosses of largish (budget wise company) running around like headless chickens yelling to kill every running instance of service just because they were hit by way more "success" that they've planned for.
Shutdown your servers? Wipe your SSDs and storage buckets? Remove your DNS records? Should it be permanent? If not then they're just subsidizing the costs. If it's soft-limit then its just a warning, and if you just want a warning then billing alarms already exist in every cloud.
Also for most customers, the data and service is far more important than the cost. Bills can be negotiated or forgiven afterwards. Lost data and customers can't.
You know. When I hit the storage limit of my SSD it doesn't wipe my data. It just ceases to store more data. When I rent a server for a fixed price and my service is under a DDOS attack then it will simply cease to work for the duration of the attack. If there is a variable service like lamba that charges per execution then lambda can simply cease to run my jobs.
You can neatly separate time based and usage based charges and set a limit for them separately. It doesn't even need to be a monetary limit, it could be a resource based limit. Every service would be limited to 0GB storage, 0GB RAM, 0 nodes, 0 queries, 0 api calls by default and you set the limit to whatever you want. AWS or Google Cloud could then calculate the maximum possible bill for the limits you have chosen. People will can then set their limits so that a surprise bill won't be significantly above their usual bill.
Your comment is lazy and not very creative. You're just throwing your hands up and pretending there is no other way even though cloud providers have created this situation for their own benefit.
Before you go around calling people lazy, I suggest you put more thought into why creating more options for people who are overwhelmed by options is generally not productive and can cause unintended consequences and expose liability. With some more thought, you'll also realize that AWS is optimized for businesses and, as stated, losing customers or data is much worse than paying a higher bill, which can always be negotiated after the fact.
In other words, I don't necessarily need to set a hard spending limit, but I want to set a hard spending growth limit (allowing for short bursts), either directly in monetary terms or indirectly through rate limits on individual services.
I'd be absolutely fine with that in a sub-account or resource group as long as I had to enable it.
A while back I wanted to try out an Azure Resource Manager template as part of learning something. Since I was _learning_ it, I wasn't 100% positive what it was going to do, but I knew that it should cost about $1 to deploy it.
With a hard limit on spending I would have set it to $10, run the thing and been ok with the account being wiped if I hit $10. Even $100 I could tolerate. Unlimited $$ was too risky for me, so I chickened out.
The worst part is I can't even delete my CC because it's tied to an expired trial that I can't update billing for.
> Also for most customers, the data and service is far more important than the cost.
So don't enable the hard limit.
A good article is around 50k visits. The most I've done was 300k over a few days of going viral on HN/reddit/twitter/other. I published some stats there https://thehftguy.com/2017/09/26/hitting-hacker-news-front-p...
I run a small side business, and these unlimited cloud plans are just a no go. A medium to large company could totally absorb a 5 figures bill, but that would be a dead sentence to my side project. Also, considering the variable costs of bandwidth of AWS, Azure or Cloudflare, one competitor could simple rent an OVH server and incur insane costs to my business while only spending 1/10 of the money.
Right now, I'm using Heroku (with a limited number of dynos and a single PgSQL database) together with BunnyCDN (which allow me to pay for prepaid usage). If I ever get DDoS'ed, my app will most probably be inaccessible or at least significantly slower, while I'll receive an email alert, from which I can decide myself to allocate more resources.
(My experience with high-ranking HN posts: initially with DreamHost, later with cheapest AWS ec2—never a noticeable impact with either)
HN/reddit/twitter/android can all send a similar amount of traffic. There's one order of magnitude there, how many places an article is featured at the same time?
Then there's an order of magnitude within each place, how much interest and readership the article could gather? Highly variable. The first comment alone can make or break an article.
I also haven’t had the number one spot on HN (except maybe briefly), but was in 2 and 3 for long stretches and even an order of magnitude more traffic wouldn’t have been a problem.
Two orders probably would have been, but I have a hard time imagining a 100x traffic difference between the 1 spot and the 2 spot. Then again, if it was a very slow day here vs a very busy day maybe (though in my case it wasn’t a very slow day).
It's not about rank. It's about the specifics of the article, mainly the title and the content. It simply attracts more or less readership.
Wouldn't be surprised if I'm top 1% of personal bloggers on HN or something like that. I'd be shelling out AWS thousands of dollars over the years if I were using anything AWS, or more likely I'd be either broke or the blog would have crumbled under the traffic each time never going viral.
And I don’t know how you’d set up your blog with AWS but I don’t see how it could be expensive to host static content there.
I honestly wonder what's the average distribution for HN contributors. I imagine it's not much for personal blogs. Not trying to compare myself to the new york times or cloudflare blog obviously.
The difference between $2 and $20 will strike when you start having pictures and with $200 the day you (accidentally) put a large image or GIF.
With an ad blocker, this page takes 83 requests to load a total of 2.31 MB.
Wordpress is actually really good on that, it's resizing the images automatically for thumbnails and mobiles with caching.